Chartbeat delivers real-time analytics, content intelligence, and transformative newsroom tools for digital media and publishing companies around the world.
Chartbeat wanted to standardize product data across multiple business units to better understand user behavior.
Using Pendo Analytics, In-app Guides, Session Replay and Listen, Chartbeat consolidated its tech stack and saved time combing through data.
Chartbeat now has one single platform for all product data and reduced time spent data grooming by 86%.
Imagine this moment—you’re grocery shopping, trying to find ingredients for a specific recipe, and the store you’re in doesn’t have what you need (honestly, Fenugreek can be hard to find).
The next store has it, but you remembered another missing ingredient that they don’t have. So, it’s onto another store. What should have been a simple one-stop errand turned into an afternoon of store hopping and lost time.
Using point solutions is a very similar situation. Leveraging multiple different software tools at a time means hopping from one platform to another, jerryrigging solutions for not-so-perfect integrations, and losing a lot of time in the process.
Chartbeat, a web analytics tool for media organizations, was in a multiple point solution position—using multiple tools that all did different things.It worked for a while, but as the business grew, point solutions became an unsustainable choice.
After starting as a single-product company, Chartbeat expanded to a multi-brand operation with global reach. In order to support growth and continue delivering what their customers needed, the company wanted a unified, scalable product operations strategy.
For Dianni Ortegon, senior manager of global product operations, the challenge was clear: “We had so many new business units. We needed someone looking into product analytics, understanding customer feedback and feature requests, and operationalizing product across the board.”
The company had grown through the acquisition of Tubular Labs, Lineup, and Fattail—each with its own tools, workflows, and customer data sources. That growth brought complexity. “We were using multiple tools like Mixpanel, Productboard, and Jira. Either we didn’t have much data at our fingertips, or it lived in too many places,” said Ortegon.
Luckily, Ortegon and her colleagues were no strangers to Pendo. “We were already big advocates,” she said as someone who’d used Pendo at a previous job. “When other team members realized we didn’t have a great way to track usage and adoption, we turned to Pendo Analytics and Guides.”
Initially, Chartbeat adopted Pendo to understand product usage and drive adoption across its flagship platform. “Our product is used by major newsrooms—like The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post—who use it to track content performance. We use Pendo to track how they interact with our platform,” explained Ortegon. “It’s like inception analytics: they use us to look at their data, and we use Pendo to look at how they use us.”
Over time, Chartbeat expanded its Pendo footprint. What began with simple tagging and in-app guides grew to include Session Replay and eventually Listen, Pendo’s AI-powered feedback analysis tool. “We migrated from Mixpanel to Pendo entirely—product, design, and customer success are all in one platform now,” Ortegon said.
With multiple business units and feedback channels—including Slack, Zendesk, Gong, and Salesforce—Chartbeat’s product team faced an uphill battle when it came to synthesizing feedback. “I’d spend seven hours a week grooming data across multiple products looking for impactful customer feedback,” Ortegon recalled. “There was no quick way to identify themes or trends.”
That all changed with Listen. The tool’s conversational interface and AI-powered analysis immediately stood out. “The name of the game here is quick insights,” she said. “Now I can ask, ‘What’s the feedback around this feature over the past 180 days?’ and I get themes, topics, and even the associated ARR.”
The impact has been significant. Ortegon estimates the grooming process has gone from seven hours to one—a 86% time reduction.
It’s not about removing the human from the process—we still want to apply judgment—but [Pendo] Listen makes it fast and easy to see what matters.
Dianni Ortegon, Senior Manager of Global Product Operations, Chartbeat
Looking ahead, Chartbeat plans to expand how it uses Listen to support a full voice-of-the-customer lifecycle. “We want to bring ideas to stakeholders across product, sales, and customer success and show them where feedback is in the pipeline,” Ortegon said. “Maybe it’s in the parking lot now. But as we get more feedback, we can move it to the roadmap.”
That internal transparency is mirrored in external communication, too. “We do a roadmap presentation for customers every year. Now we can close the loop and show them what we’re doing with their feedback, or explain why something won’t be prioritized,” she said.
Beyond the technology, Chartbeat values the collaboration with Pendo’s team. “Your product team really came to the table. I got to give direct feedback to the people building Listen, which was incredible,” Ortegon shared. “Even though Listen didn’t have every integration yet, knowing it was on your roadmap and seeing your team’s willingness to partner made all the difference.”
For a lean product team managing multiple brands, that support mattered. “We’re a team of fifteen product managers across the organization. We couldn’t afford to manage feedback manually anymore.”
The transition from scattered tools to a single platform has paid off. Chartbeat now enjoys simplified workflows, faster planning cycles, and greater visibility across the product lifecycle. “[Pendo has] made us more productive and aligned,” said Ortegon.
And there’s more to come. “I think Listen is going to be game-changing for how we plan. It’s already saving us time—and giving us the insights we need to make better product decisions.”
